Olympics endurance sport

To adapt a phrase, three things are certain: death, taxes and negative coverage of the 2012 Olympic games right the way up until six weeks before, when suddenly it'll turn all jingoistic and "ain't Britain great" (assuming, of course, that Britain still exists in 2012).

As any fule kno, there isn't a single newspaper or broadcast journalist in the land who is interested in writing a positive story about the 2012 Games right now. What on earth would be the point?

So, today's budget breakdown from Tessa Jowell was never going to attract slaps on the back, despite the fact that (as far as we can tell) she seemed to be saying "the price might go up, but it's within the planned contingency." Which seems sort of OK to our non-business minds.

Didn't stop Stephen Pollard from exercising his right to rant with this juicy tidbit, relating the Olympics spending with the earlier evidence of the Gord's Scrooge-like instincts:

Welcome to Gordon Brown's moral compass. It's fine to throw an unlimited pot of billions of pounds of our money paying for people to run around in a converted dump. But finding a fraction of that money to do something for 125,000 people who have worked all their lives in good faith and whose companies have gone bust, and who now have no pension, is beyond the pale.

To channel Jonathan Swift for a moment: somebody in the Gord's coterie has almost certainly by now proposed that those pensioners be put to work building stadia. It's the kind of good advice they're becoming known for.

Written by Lloyd Shepherd on 10 Dec 2007 4:44 PM. Permalink